One of the things I find most fascinating about Russians is their extremely complicated relationship with truth and lies, or at least it seems complicated to me as a Westerner, where our stance is pretty straightforward: Lying is bad and telling the truth is good. And as my background is in science, where the pursuit of truth is so paramount there's a super hairy system of ruling out all possible untruth, it's easy for me to think of truth as always being righteous. Or maybe it's the fact I svck at lying, so I don't try very often. And I'm a Sagittarius, an incurably honest species, so they say. How's that for scientific? LOL.
But how's this for irony: dedication to scientific exploration was one of the few great things to come out of the Soviet Union and benefit the Russian people and the whole world .....while at the same time ....... the Soviets were arguably just as dedicated to the art of disinformation, which is arguably the greatest threat to the whole world now, not despite this being the Information Age, but BECAUSE of it. And what has been the legacy of Russia, post-Soviet era? Which strategy endures and grows, truth or lies? Is the average Westerner more likely to picture a scientist or an internet farm troll, when they think of a Russian? Do we expect them to help us or hack us? And isn't the spread of Soviet-style disinformation the very reason why so many Westerners have come to doubt the honesty of scientists, that all it takes now is for a political figure (or random social media stranger who can't even spell basic words) who expresses similar political views to a target audience, to simply say they can't trust scientists, and so they don't?
The impression I get of the Russian culture's attitudes about truth and lies (which could be a false impression but it comes from pre-Soviet literature as much as any time since) is that it's really a spectrum, not a polar binary like we pretend in the West. Oh sure, we acknowledge pseudo-nuances, like "white lies," but even there the implication is that any lie a shade darker than white is evil, an affront to whomever it is told, so shameful it will rot some part of the liar even if no one ever knows they lied, and (to some people) God definitely knows. Parents tell their children they will be in so much more trouble if they lie to cover up a wrongdoing, than if they only do wrong. So many adults who've been cheated on by their spouse are just as hurt (if not more) by realizing how much time they lived blissfully ignorant of the betrayal, because the spouse kept them that way, by lying.
But the sense I get about Russians is that lying isn't inherently wrong; it's human nature, therefore the natural, even WISE choice in many instances, but given this allowance, you better be *^#$!# good at it, because everyone accepting lies to some degree means everyone expecting lies to some degree. And I'm making that sound pretty bleak, ha, but only because I'm failing to state it as well as a Russian probably could. I think , as hostile as such a culture may sound, there is actually a kind of peace in it, maybe tense like the surface of water, but calm water at least, unlike the whitewater rapids of bliss-pain-bliss-pain that we experience in the West.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is an old Russian proverb: 'With lies you can go forward in the world, but you can never go back.' Such a beautiful and simple statement that even as a Westerner I think I get it. The Russian language also has two words for 'truth': istina (absolute truth) and pravda (apparent truth), but how that works in actual day-to-day conversations, I honestly have no idea, but I'd like to. What makes me so sad for the Russian people now is that they surely KNOW Putin is lying to them to some extent (because he's Russian if nothing else), but have no way to gauge the extent because of how tightly he controls their access to any outside views, like allowing them to see only the FOX version of American views, for example. Giving them pravda and telling them it's istina. With this he may take them forward in the world, but probably not, and either way they'll never be able to go back.
